Rail Inspection Meets Big Data: Methods and Trends

Rail inspection is one of the most important tasks for rail industry, in order to guarantee the safety of railway systems and control their cost. Rail are systematically inspected for defects using various non-destructive evaluation (NDE) techniques, which include ultrasonic inspection, visual detection, magnetic flux leakage method, acoustic emission inspection etc. The data obtained by these NDE devices are going to increase in both quality and quantity, therefore big data has emerged as a potential challenge for rail inspection. This paper reviews the advanced NDE techniques for rail inspection, and brings forward a new framework of rail inspection based on big data, according to the characteristics of inspection data.